The Cocaine Chronicles (11 page)

. . professionally speaking, of course. Take care.”

I looked up at Tommyboy, who gave me a smile from the side of his mouth, as I put my arm around Nicole and hurried her out of the Head. When I looked back, Ronnie-baby was hanging over the bar like a dead sentinel. It couldn’t have been sweeter.

Out on cold, dark Christopher Street we laughed and hugged one another.

“That was wonderful,” she said. “How the hell did you come up with that?”

“Inspiration, my dear,” I said. “The source of which is your beautiful face, your stunning eyes, your raven-black hair.”

She looked at me and actually blushed.

“You’re wonderful,” she said.

“We’re both wonderful,” I said.

Then we kissed, one of those long, passionate public kisses, the kind that makes love a spectacle. The kind that draws attention from everyone on the street, and the kind I always loved for exactly that reason.

And yet, this time, this time something happened. You know all that heart talk—I mean, how one kiss can make you lose your heart, your heart skipping beats, zing went the strings of my heart—all that kind of pop crap, the likes of which I had never felt before? Well, this time, God help me, something happened. Kissing those lips, feeling her breasts press into my chest, I not only wanted her sexually, I wanted, God help me, to take care of her, too. Oh God, what was happening to me? I wanted to cherish her. I was gone, wasted, down the blue drain of love.

I literally pulled myself away from her. This wasn’t happening. Not to me, Roger Deakens, adopted son of Alfie.

It was the coke . . . had to be the coke . . .
Yeah
, that’s what it was, the cocaine. What the hell had the Wease put in that shit? Maybe some kind of goddamned love potion? Yeah, that was it. That had to be it. He was jealous, very, very jealous of me and all my success with women. He’d even said so on more than one occasion. I remembered the night we’d both been hustling this blonde from Iowa, Susan something, a real looker, and he’d really wanted her, felt, he told me later, something really strong for her, and I’d just whisked her away doing my riff-specific Kansas corn-fed routine. Yeah, I’d aww-shucked her right into bed. And he was pissed because he knew that I didn’t give a damn if I ever saw her again. That really pissed him off. He’d even said he’d get even with me someday, and this must have been that day. He’d put some kind of goddamned erotic love potion in the coke, but even as I entertained these thoughts, I knew it wasn’t so. Nah, that was bullshit. That was crap I was telling myself so I wouldn’t feel this horrible and yet so unbearably wonderful feeling of losing control, of slipping away

. . .

Oh God, what had happened to me? As we walked toward Seventh Avenue I had my arm around her and I felt, really felt, that if I lost Nicole I was doomed, that I would do anything for her love, that if I didn’t have her and keep her, my life would be nothing but the proverbial empty shell.

And then we were waiting for a cab, and she hugged me and said, “God, I want you inside me. I want your cock in me so bad.”

And I heard myself groaning with lust, with a need that was worse than any lowly junkie’s H-jones.

And she said, “My place. Let’s go to my place. I’m just two blocks away on Barrow and Hudson.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. Let’s go. I’ve got some coke with me.”

“Fabulous,” she said. “I love coke.”

And then we were running across Seventh, stopping every two or three feet to kiss, to grope one another, and I knew that it was all over. Impossible as it sounded, I was finished, dead, totally whacked on love. By the end of this very night, I knew without a shadow of a doubt, I would ask this complete stranger to be my wife.

“Oh God, I can’t stand it,” she said, as I groped her in the elevator at 72 Barrow Street.

“Baby, baby, baby,” I said, knowing it was a hopeless cliché but not caring anymore. Originality, it occurred to me, doesn’t matter when you’re in love. Neither does being riff specific.

We scrambled out of the elevator on the fifth floor. I put my hand up her dress and felt her unbelievably tight ass, as she opened the door, moaning.

Then we were inside. I can’t describe the place . . . only her lips, her hair, her arms around me, my hands under her blouse, the incredible tautness of her nipples.

“Nicole, Nicole, Nicole,” I repeated like an idiot.

“Roger, Roger, Roger,” she refrained. I’d always hated my name but now it sounded like pure sex.

I kissed her hard, harder, my tongue found her throat. We staggered across the room as I pulled up her dress and put my hand into her throbbing, wet cunt. It was literally pulsating with pleasure and she screamed when I put my middle finger up her asshole.

She fell back against the wall, and I pressed my hard cock into her. A picture fell down. Crashed to the floor. I laughed wildly. This was real sex, not one of my carefully orchestrated little games. And I loved every second of it. And yet it was terrifying, for I felt wildly out of control.

I took off her suit top and started in on her blouse but she pulled away, panting.

“I need to see you naked first.”

“Really?”

“Yes, believe me, it’ll be worth it. I need to see your hard cock, baby.”

I felt suddenly frightened. I was used to giving the orders. But now . . . God, I only wanted to please her.

I stood back, unbuttoned and slowly unzipped my pants. Smiling, I let my pants drop to the floor as I started kicking off my $300 shoes.

She smiled back as she saw my cock, and I knew she was mine. All mine, my lovely Nicole. Oh man, I loved her. I did . . . I wanted her. I needed her. I would fuck her until she screamed, begged for more, then screamed again, again, again . . . Or maybe, maybe this time it would be me doing the screaming and begging. I no longer cared.

“Do you like it?” I said, looking down at my hard member.

“Yes,” she said. “Oh yes, I do.”

“Me too,” said a voice from behind me. “That’s a real winner, for sure.”

I turned, breathless, and to my horror saw the boss, Ron Baines, coming through the unlocked front door. There was a .38 in his right hand. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I yelled.

He didn’t say a word, but ran right at me, raised the gun, and smashed the butt into my skull.

I felt a hot flash pass through me as I fell into a very undignified heap on the floor.

Blood rolled down my nose, over my lips. I was drowsy and my head pulsated with pain, but I was still conscious. I looked up at Nicole, my Nicole, for some kind of help, if only moral support.

But she didn’t look like Nicole anymore. She was staring down at me as if I were a bug under a microscope.

“Get his hands,” Baines said.

She reached down, and I weakly pushed her away. That was another mistake because Baines whacked me again with the gun butt, and this time I fell on my back, barely conscious. Blood ran down my neck and collar. They tied my hands behind me with some kind of cord that cut into my wrists, nearly cutting off my circulation.

Lying there in my own blood, I felt like an old dog whose body was covered in tumors.

“Now I could gag you, but we have to talk to you first. You scream at all, you get this.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned push-button knife. He hit the button and I was staring at a saw-toothed eight-inch blade.

“I won’t scream,” I said.

“Good. By the way, you were really excellent back there at the bar,” Baines said. “The whole fiancé bit was a real good improv.

You’re fine, for an amateur.”

“Look,” I said, “I have a hundred bucks in my pocket. Just take it.”

They looked at one another and laughed.

“He thinks we want money,” Baines said.

Nicole reached down and held up my chin. “Look at this picture,” she said.

I looked at the snapshot she thrust at me. A young blond woman with a nice face, a cheerleader’s freshness, but with slightly big teeth. The photo looked to be several years old. The woman seemed vaguely familiar.

“I don’t know her,” I said.

“You fucking liar,” Nicole replied. “She met you in that same bar two years ago. Her name was Gail. Gail Harden.”

I tried but I couldn’t quite recall her. Still, there was something— that overbite.

“You remember her, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “There’s some mistake. I never knew her.”

She kicked me in the ribs with her high heels. I groaned, shook my head.

“You were all she could talk about. Roger, the ad genius. Roger, who made love to her for five weeks. Roger and she were going to get married.”

“Married? No. No way I ever told her that.”

“Then you do admit you knew her.”

Now I remembered. Two years ago. I had just gotten back from the Hamptons and wasn’t quite ready to give up my good times. She was sitting in the Head one evening, just before it got dark, dressed in this pretty little flower-print gown. She just looked so young and summery. The perfect way for me to launch back into work.

“Okay,” I said. “We went out for a few weeks. Three, maybe four times, but that was it. And I never promised her anything . . .”

“Bullshit, you gave her coke, right?”

“Maybe.”

Now it was Ronnie’s turn to kick me in the ribs. I groaned and thought I could feel my organs leaking blood.

“Okay, I did. So what? Everybody does a little toot or two. C’mon. It wasn’t like it was her first time.”

“No, but it was the first time she’d fallen in love. Then you dumped her. She called you over and over, begged you just to call her back, to be her friend.”

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “When it’s over, it’s over.

I didn’t want to lead her on. I never promised her anything. You bring her here and ask her in front of me. You’ll see.”

“That would be kind of hard,” Nicole said. “My sister went home to Minnesota and hung herself. She left these poems all about you.”

She dumped a book that looked like a journal in front of me.

It fell open and I saw poems written in colored inks. The kind a junior high school girl might have written.

“No, that’s a lie,” I said.

She stuck another picture on the floor. A police photograph of Gail hanging from an attic beam. She had on that same summery floral dress. She had long, beautiful legs, like her sister’s. Suddenly, I didn’t know why, I began to pray, “Oh God, God, God . . . You can’t blame that on me. She must have been unstable to begin with, right? She must have been crazy.”

“She loved you. You turned her onto drugs, made her crazy for you, then you dumped her. You murdered her, as surely as if you’d kicked over the chair she stood on.”

“Who are you, her brother?” I said, crying.

“No, I’m Nicole’s husband, asshole. We planned this for a long time. We were going to invite you out to dinner with us . . . but you turned the tables on us. But it doesn’t matter. You can just as well drink your dessert right here.”

He pulled two small vials out of his big Burberry coat. One red, the other blue.

“See these?” he said. “One works like battery acid. The other will just make you violently ill, but you might survive. We’re going to give you a chance. Drink either one, then wait five minutes.

You’ll know. They’re both bad, but the poison makes you start to bleed from your ears, nose, and asshole. The other one will only destroy most of your intestines.”

“Bullshit. You’re nuts. I’m not drinking either one of them,” I said.

“If you don’t,” Nicole said, “we’ll knock you unconscious and pour the one with the poison down your throat.”

Up until that point I’d been scared but somehow numbed by the whole thing. I mean, there was an air of unreality to the whole strange affair thanks to the coke, but it was rapidly wearing off.

“Which one will it be, Rog?” Baines said. “The red bottle or the blue?” He put them close to my lips; that’s when I began to scream.

“Help me! Help, they’re killing me!”

“Wrong answer,” he said, slamming the gun butt down on my head.

I came awake in a white room, my stomach burning, my throat scorched by fire. I tried to talk but it felt as though someone had used a flamethrower on me. Then I tried to move my arms, to signal somebody for help, but I was strapped to a gurney, like a madman. That made sense because I
was
a madman, a madman burning alive from the inside out.

I thrashed my bashed-in head from side to side, looking for help, making dying-bird noises.

Suddenly, the white curtain flew back and there was a tall woman who looked like a doctor peering down at me through thick glasses. Behind her was . . . Wease. My coke dealer.

“Weease,” I croaked.

“Keep calm, Mr. Deakens,” the doctor said.

“Gonna . . . Gonnaa . . . die,” I croaked. “Poisoned.”

Wease moved forward.

“No,” he said. “They pumped your stomach. You’re gonna make it, Rog.”

“Besides,” the doctor said, “whatever you drank wasn’t poison. It was a habanero-pepper drink. It only feels like it’s going to kill you.”

I fell back on the gurney and shut my eyes.

“What the fuck you drink that stuff for?” Wease said.

“Made me,” I croaked.

“Who?”

“Don’t know. People . . . met at the Head.”

Every word felt like someone poking barbed wire into my throat.

“Oh, the chick at the end of the bar and the big guy in the coat?”

I nodded, a bilious stream of liquid fire coming up my throat and nose.

“The police are going to want to talk to you, Mr. Deakens,” the doctor said. “And you too, sir.”

She glanced at Wease, who furtively looked away from her into the hall.

“Hey, I was just in the ’hood and heard a scream,” he said. “I don’t need to talk to any cops.”

Before she could say another word, Wease was out the door.

Guess he wanted to get rid of his stash before the Village cops came.

I started to give a little laugh, but the pepper drink came up inside me again, and I fell back, gagging, choking, and generally sounding like a guy with throat cancer.

The doctor put a needle in my arm, and right before I fell asleep I thought of the damnedest thing. Not the way they’d tricked me, not the way they’d beaten and humiliated me, but instead I thought of Nicole’s kiss. The softness of it, the perfection of her flesh. How I was sure, so sure, I loved her. How even now, after all this had happened, I wanted to kiss her again. Absurd as it was, it was almost a happy memory, and I’d have been content to go out with it, but right before I lost consciousness I saw the sister, Gail Harden, hanging from the rafters, and I wanted to die.
Just let me
go to sleep, God, and never wake me up again.